I just hope God takes you away soon.

That was what his mother had always said when she was in a bad mood. She’d mumble it in response to just about anything, like some family curse passed down through the generations from her great-grandmother’s great-grandmother. I just hope God takes you away soon.

He barely had any memories of her other than those words. He could remember his friends telling him Man, your mom is so pretty, but he couldn’t really remember her face. Somehow he thought he’d never particularly considered her “pretty.” All that really stuck in his mind was the impression that she’d been in a bad mood most days, and on the days when she wasn’t, she’d always looked ready to start crying. That was all he knew…No, come to think of it, there was one other thing he remembered: she’d hated her rust-colored hair, so she’d always hid it under a scarf.

Maybe the reason she’d hated her son was that he’d inherited that exact same hair.

Not that there was any way to find out now. Not that he really cared to know anyway.

As he sat nimbly on the bar, smoking a cigarette and staring off into space, something rolled beneath his feet. A soccer ball, filthy with sand. Two small hands equally filthy with sand, enough sand to work its way underneath their short fingernails, picked it up and cradled it tenderly.

Still crouched there holding the ball, little Elisha looked up at him.

“Effy, wanna play?”

“That’s ‘Ephraim,’” he corrected her for form’s sake. He’d given up on her actually listening by now. He’d never heard of anybody shortening “Ephraim” to “Effy,” but Elisha didn’t know how to spell, so she made up random nicknames based on the sounds she heard. She couldn’t say “Ephraim,” so she’d shortened it to “Effry,” and then shortened that to “Effy.”

“Let’s play.”

“Not happening,” he said flatly. He turned and blew out his smoke in the other direction. She blinked up at him in surprise, and then brought the forefinger and thumb of one hand to her mouth, pursed her lips, and said “Ffffft!” What, are you trying to copy me or something? When he glared at her out of the corner of his eye, she stopped copying, and that face that almost never smiled brightened a tiny bit, as if she were having fun.

“Elisha, hurry up and bring back the ball!” cried another voice in the schoolyard. She hopped to her feet and ran over with the ball in her arms. The little kids waiting for the ball spread back out across the schoolyard and picked up their game again. They weren’t actually letting Elisha play with them; she was only the ball-fetcher. But she probably thought she was part of the game. She was hanging around the field, running after the ball with all the others and getting left behind along the way, and then when it came back, she’d chase it again and be left behind again.

It wasn’t a very big schoolyard. Other than the field, they only had the sand pit and the chin-up bars. As usual, the sky was cloudy and sand-colored. No matter how far he tilted back to look, it was always the same—

“Ah!”

He overbalanced and tumbled backward off the bar. The world flipped upside down. At around the point where the ground was right overhead he managed to hook the backs of his knees around the bar and dangle there. “That was close…” The cigarette had almost slipped out of his mouth, so he resettled it between his lips.

Without really knowing why, he stayed like that, looking at the upside-down world. Even from the opposite direction, the sky was still the same old cloudy sand color. If “God” or whoever was really watching from the other side of it, he was sure the layer of dust pollution kept Him from ever having an unbroken view of the world below.

In a distant corner of their sky, the long, low boom of a cannon sounded.

That was the same as always, too: a boringly familiar sound. It was all just a part of his daily life.

Episode 1: Joachim

“How come Harry’s eye and arm are hurt?”

Hey! She just busted out with a question I wanted to ask but held off on!

“Is he your boyfriend, Kieli?”

Yeah, can you clarify that once and for all?

“Have you kissed?”

…Well, have you?

Bearfoot was listening in on the conversation between the two girls next to him and silently chiming in. Kids sure didn’t mince words!

But in this case it wasn’t really working as a “conversation,” since one girl kept asking her next question before the other had figured out how to answer the last one. Apparently Nana, who was famous for being as hard to please as they come and who never approached any of the adults in the troupe, had taken a shine to Kieli. She was bundled into the truck’s passenger seat along with Kieli, playing with her teddy bear and keeping up an innocent barrage of questions.

It was the afternoon of the sixth day of the Colonization Days festivities, and the holiday was more than half over. They were running low on food and other things, so someone needed to go get more supplies. Kieli had volunteered to shop on behalf of all the performers, since they had to work, and they’d decided to elect one more person to go with her as driver and bag handler. Considering that this person would not only get the afternoon off, but also get to make a trip into town with Kieli, Bearfoot had happily nominated himself. But who’d have thought she’d have a kid in tow…? Well, okay, anyone who’d thought about it at all, actually.

So they’d borrowed the troupe leader’s personal light truck, gone to the market by the central train station, bought a ton of food and daily supplies, done all the personal shopping and post office errands other performers had asked them to take care of as if they were some kind of odd-jobs service, and crammed the truck to the bursting point with bags and boxes. Now they were finally on their way home. A nice, peaceful conversation was going on in the passenger seat, but, to be honest, Bearfoot was just a tiny bit terrified. In fact, he was clutching the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white.

It had seemed like such a waste to go straight home and end their time together, so he’d had the bright idea of going back by a different route and having a bit of a drive. That had been his fatal mistake. Right now the truck was making its way slowly through the main street of southeastern downtown. Their shopping had eaten up a lot of time, so it was already pretty much sundown. This was when groups of sketchy guys started to hang out on either side of the street, and when all the prostitutes came out to make their pitches under the streetlights.

Westerbury’s central city was the largest metropolis on the planet; a lot of different people came here for a lot of different reasons. That meant it wasn’t exactly a paradise of public safety. The Church Soldiers still policed the market, the area around the train station, and the upper-class residential neighborhoods of uptown, but downtown was well on its way to being a lawless zone. Pickpockets and purse-snatchers were common on the streets, of course, and it wasn’t unusual for people to rob vehicles, either.

Damn, this sucks…He sighed, ignoring for the moment the fact that it was his own fault. He wanted to get out of here ASAP, but the people talking by the roadside were overflowing into the street itself, too; and sometimes they started to cross with no warning, so he couldn’t build up any speed. By the time they got back to camp, his fellow entertainers would probably have wrapped up their jobs and started trickling back from the park.

Out of nowhere, he heard a fwhoo sound like a whoopee cushion coming from underneath his feet, and the body of the truck jolted downward. “Aw, man!” Bearfoot knew right away that something was wrong. So he pulled over into the shoulder and stepped on the brake. Then he jumped down to take a look, leaving the two girls looking confusedly down from their perch on their seat. Circling around to the front, he peered down and saw that, just as he’d expected, the front tire was losing air. It looked as though they’d run over some piece of sharp, pointed metal. The litter in the streets here was as bad as the neighborhood crime rate.

“Do we…have a flat?” asked Kieli, leaning out of the passenger window. He replied with a noise somewhere between agreement and animal sorrow. She hopped out of her seat, said “Should we push it home?” as if it were nothing much, really, and began circling around to the back, actually gesturing as if she was about to roll up her sleeves.

“No, no, don’t worry about it,” he said to stop her. It might not be a big truck, but it was filled with cargo. It would be a lot harder for two people to push it back (and he wasn’t about to let their other companion join the team) than she obviously thought. And more to the point, I don’t want to! Fortunately, though, it wasn’t a full-out flat, so he thought they could probably manage to make it as far as the camp before it gave out.

In fact, the larger issue here was how scary the truck’s owner was going to be when he found out…For a moment he pictured the troupe leader’s harsh face and started trying to come up with a good excuse, but just then—

“No!” said Nana, in a voice just short of a scream. He and Kieli both started and turned to look at the passenger seat, only to see one of the young punks who’d been loitering by the roadside sticking halfway into the truck through the driver’s-side window, rooting around inside the cab. He’d grabbed the wallet Bearfoot had left sitting on the seat (he’d been carrying a lot of the troupe’s money for this trip, too!). Now he was in the process of ripping the radio right out of the dashboard.

“Hey!” As Bearfoot started for the driver’s door, the whole truck gave a rattling lurch. Other youngsters, presumably friends of the first one, had piled into the bed from behind. When the one in the front seat shook off Nana, who was grabbing at him, and pulled away from the truck, the group in the back did the same, taking their pick of whatever was closest and then scattering.

“Bearfoot!”

Kieli turned to him as if to say One of us has to go after them! “Huh? Wha —” There were five or six of them, and they looked like seriously bad news. He couldn’t help it; he went weak in the knees with fear (No, this isn’t me being a coward! There’s a difference between bravery and recklessness!). But before he had time to even say anything, Nana jumped down from the truck and tore past both of them after the thieves. “H-Hey!”

Dumbfounded, he somehow managed to grab her by the collar and haul her back, at which point she promptly burst into tears. Her two tiny hands stretched out in front of her, reaching for something. “Mr. Bear! Mr. Bear!”

Mr. Bear? Come to think of it, he kind of thought he’d seen the guy take Nana’s teddy bear along with the car radio when he pushed her off. “Whoa, wait! Kieli?!”

“Please stay with Nana!”

“I said wait!”

Kieli ignored him and took off running after the teddy bear thief—that is, the guy who’d robbed the truck. “Wai—ow, ow, ow!” And while Nana clawed at him, trying to get free and go with her, she melted right into the crowd, and he lost sight of her. For a few seconds, both arms wrapped around the struggling Nana, he was completely at a loss.

“…Oh, crap!” This was no time to just stand around like a moron. Bearfoot shoved Nana into the passenger’s seat and swung himself up into the cab.

The thieves split up into two groups as they ran, so Kieli dived around the corner of the alley where she’d seen the man who’d fished around in their driver’s seat go.

Huh…?

No one was there. She knew she’d seen two of the men come this way, but now they were gone. Beneath the copper-and-slate evening sky the alley stretched on, covered with trash and completely deserted. As she stepped into it, looking left and right, something fell on the ground a few meters ahead of her. Yes, there was a teddy bear lying buried in a heap of trash on the street, smiling at her a little sadly.

She started to run up to it, but then something brought her up short. When she craned her neck to look at the spot the bear had fallen from, she saw two shadowy figures standing on an outside staircase that ran along the wall. One on a landing about halfway up the first flight, and one a little farther up, watching her with their elbows propped against the railing.

“How about you come get it?” one of them teased. The other let out a choked laugh.

Half of her mind was warning her not to go, but she wanted to get Nana’s toy back. Kieli understood just as painfully well as Nana, or maybe even better than Nana, how precious a playmate a stuffed animal could be at that age.

Gulping, she cautiously walked up to the fallen bear. She kept a careful eye on the staircase above her as she stooped down to pick it up. Just as her hand connected with it, there was a crash behind her, and her heart leapt in her chest. When she whirled around to look, the man who’d been on the landing was standing right in front of her. He’d jumped down to block her way out. Now he was tossing something from one hand to the other, toying with it. A folding knife…

Kieli remembered what she’d thought after capturing the burglar: If he’d been older or maybe even had a knife, I could’ve gotten really hurt. And the Corporal had even warned her, and she’d promised to be careful!

She inched backward, hugging the toy to her chest, but the man’s friend stopped her by jumping down from the steps right behind her. So she tried to run instead, but he grabbed her hair from behind and yanked her back. “No!”

“It’s dangerous for a little girl to wander into an alley like this alone, you know.” You’re the ones making it dangerous! Kieli’s heart cried back at him as she tried to pull free. The man with the knife grabbed her arm, knocking the teddy bear loose and sending it flying.

Let me go! she tried to shout, but she couldn’t get the sound to come out of her throat. Now that her body couldn’t move, her brain was finally catching up and realizing just how frightening this really was. I’m scared, please, somebody…HARVEY!

And as if in response to her unconscious call for help, suddenly a hand reached out and grabbed the knife man’s wrist.

When the knife man turned around, there was a tall, skinny man there. Relieved, Kieli turned her head up to look at him—and then went blank-faced herself. Who is that? He looked the same height and age as Harvey, but he wasn’t the coppery-haired man she knew. He was a young man in a long, high-collared coat. She’d never seen him before.

Her attacker’s arm was now twisted behind his own back. He writhed and screamed in pain, but the man in the coat was apparently stronger than he looked. He didn’t even twitch. “Let me go, you bastard!” snarled the thief. In a frenzy, he threw a punch with his free hand, but the stranger dodged effortlessly with a little tilt of his head. Then he planted his own fist right in the knife man’s face.

There was a horrible wet crunch.

The knife man let out a strangled scream, his knees giving way. But the stranger kept hold of his wrist—and with his opponent dangling there like a rag doll, he administered one, two, three merciless knee-jabs to the solar plexus before casually letting go as if he’d abruptly gotten bored with the whole thing. Seeing his friend lying crumpled pathetically on the street right in front of him, the thief pulling Kieli’s hair gave a little whine of fear and then leapt backward.

Finally released, Kieli found herself sinking to the ground, suddenly limp. One look at the face of the man passed out on the pavement at her knees made her gasp. His nose must be broken…there was so much blood, she could hardly believe he’d only taken one punch.

When she raised her face to stare dumbfounded at the stranger, she understood. There was a fist-sized hunk of asphalt in his hand. He was glancing down at it in displeasure, cocking his head to one side as if he was disappointed with how it handled.

“What the hell; this guy’s dangerous…,” mumbled the other thief nervously, backing away. The stranger slowly looked up at him. Then he grinned slightly with just one side of his mouth. Bloody concrete still in his hand, he stomped on the fallen man’s wrist (there was another wet crunch) and picked up the knife that rolled down onto the ground.

With a whimper, the thief spun around like the hounds of hell were at his heels and started to run. “Not so fast,” said the man in the long coat. They were the first words he’d spoken. The thief stopped dead in his tracks, turning his neck just far enough to look back over his shoulder.

“I’ll kill him if you don’t take him with you, you know. He’s an eyesore.” To illustrate his point, he kicked the unconscious man aside like so much trash. The accomplice ran quickly back to them, making panting noises that didn’t seem to mean anything in particular anymore. He hauled his friend up and more or less dragged him away down the alley, leaving them with the completely unoriginal parting shot of “Just you wait!”

Until the hollow echoes of his words finished bouncing off the dusky concrete walls and faded, Kieli sat exactly where she was, staring after them. The man in the long coat was looking in the same direction until he abruptly turned to Kieli and said, “Wow. Did you hear that? I didn’t know anybody actually said that.”

He had a knife in one hand and a bloody lump of concrete in the other, yet the expression on his face was so utterly ordinary as he said this that Kieli was struck dumb. This guy is not normal.

“Did they hurt you?”

“No…Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he answered brightly, tossing the concrete aside. The knife he stuck in his pocket, as if it went without saying that it belonged to him now. Then he held out a hand to her and asked, “Can you stand?”

…The hand was sticky with the blood of the thug. He seemed to realize that she was hesitating and looked down at it. He offered his other hand instead, withdrawing the bloody one and licking off the palm.

He was definitely kind of strange…no, he was definitely really strange, but Kieli couldn’t see any reason to refuse the clean hand. So she timidly reached up, and he grasped her by the hand, clasped it with his own, smiled at her, and said, “So you’re not hurt, then. I guess I screwed up. Maybe I came to the rescue a little too soon? If they’d just damaged your face a little, Ephraim’s reaction could have been so much fun.”

“…Pardon?” Kieli gaped up at the man’s face. He’d said the words with such matter-of-fact cheerfulness that for a moment she couldn’t understand what they meant.

“Just kidding—no, actually, I meant that pretty seriously.” He made these amendments with no change of expression. His voice passed in one of Kieli’s ears and out the other.

She felt all the blood drain from her face.

The pleasant but unremarkable features, the way his very unremarkability was the remarkable thing about him, the strange sort-of-there, sort-of-not presence he projected…Kieli was sure it wasn’t her own poor memory that had kept her from recognizing him right away. After all, he was the kind of person you’d forget after five minutes, and she hadn’t seen him in two whole years.

The only characteristic he had that left any sort of impression was the blue-gray of his eyes. The same color as Westerbury’s bright night sky.

“Joa…chim…? But you can’t be…”

They’d told her he was dead. He’d died two years ago.

Still sitting, she tried to back away, but he had a firm grip on her hand, and she couldn’t move. The cold touch of his fingers sent a chill all the way up her arm. Still, she tried her best to crawl away from him with her other arm and legs—but it was as if her nerves were going numb; she couldn’t get her limbs to obey.

“Let me go…” Kieli was ashamed to hear how weak and hoarse her own voice sounded. She protested desperately as she jerked her captured hand. “Let me go…let me go, let me go…!”

The man in front of her blinked as if he couldn’t think why she’d be so afraid. “Wait, he didn’t say anything about me?”

“What…do you mean…?”

“You haven’t heard about what happened in the capital?”

Kieli shook her head the barest fraction, not really confirming or denying, just stunned. Yes, she’d just heard about the capital—about the lab creating Undyings, at least. But no, she hadn’t heard anything, nothing about this man. Even though Harvey’d said that was everything…

Maybe something about her reaction tickled Joachim, because he burst out laughing. “Ahaha, he just never changes! I bet he’s still hiding all kinds of stuff from you then, isn’t he?” How the heck am I supposed to know that?! The longer Kieli stayed lost in morose speechlessness, the more amused he seemed, until he couldn’t stifle his laughter anymore. And then, with no warning, he plopped down onto one knee beside her, looked her straight in the eye, and asked insinuatingly, “Would you like to know? I could tell you.” Obviously she ought to say no, but for some reason Kieli couldn’t answer right away. Instead, she ended up gazing back at those eyes peering at her from so close. “If you want to know, come over to my place.”

“What are you…saying…?” She tried to peel her eyes away from his as fast as she could, but they were fathomless, blue-gray as the sky, and they held her spellbound.

That was when the rumble of a somewhat off-kilter truck broke the silence around them. And then the short squeal of its sudden stop—

—And then—

“Kieli!”

The voice calling her name saved her, breaking her from her trance. She tore her gaze away from the man in front of her and turned to look for its owner. A small truck was parked at the alley’s entrance. As she watched, a little girl hopped down out of the passenger seat.

Then two things happened at once: Bearfoot followed after Nana, coming down out of the driver’s side, and another truck pulled to a stop with its nose sticking right into the bed of theirs. A black truck. One of the Church Soldiers’ city patrol trucks. The air between Kieli and Joachim was already tight with tension. Now a different kind of tension joined it. Joachim gave a low grunt of annoyance and then stood up, pulling Kieli up with him almost as an afterthought.

Kieli shot him a glare and slapped his hand away. Nana was just coming up to them, running toward Kieli, so she opened her arms and caught the girl up in a hug. “I’m sorry about your bear…” She reached out to pick up the now-dirty stuffed animal, but Nana shook her head violently from side to side and clung even tighter.

“Kieli, you’re okay?! I was worried!”

Bearfoot called out to them and began jogging closer, two of the Church Soldiers’ city guards in tow. Yes, Bearfoot must have found them for her. She glared at Joachim out of the corner of her eye as he began oh-so-innocently explaining, “I’m sorry, I saw them and came to help, but they got away.” (That faker!)

She considered just opening her mouth and shouting, This man is an Undying! Please help me, he’s going to eat me! But when she imagined herself saying those words she felt awful, so she kept quiet. Plus, there was also the fact that it’d be a serious problem for her if that made a bunch of Undying Hunters gather in Westerbury.

“All right then, I’ll just be on my way,” concluded Joachim at the end of a largely one-sided speech. Evidently he wasn’t inclined to stay long under the circumstances. He turned on his heel and began walking off…but as he passed by Kieli, he crouched down a bit and leaned in right next to her ear to whisper, “Come on by if you ever want to hear the story.” Then he gave an address on a street she recognized. His lips brushed lightly against her ear as he spoke, and she shuddered, ducking away. Joachim chose that moment to tack on one last thing: “Ephraim’s going to die one of these days, you know. His core isn’t working right.”

Kieli didn’t understand what he was talking about. But when she looked back up, Joachim wasn’t beside her anymore. She was barely in time to watch that tall, lean back just like another one she knew so well stride off into the darkness of the alley. Somehow while she hadn’t been paying attention, night had invaded and overtaken the sky.

Since the Church Soldiers and Bearfoot immediately began asking her all sorts of questions, it wasn’t until after she’d been released from questioning that she thought over those final words of his again.

“…Okay, look.” Having her stare straight at him like that for so long made him uncomfortable. He carefully kept his gaze trained somewhere just shy of direct eye contact, yet where he could still keep her face in his peripheral vision. He could feel the strain in his face. “What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing,” Kieli answered in a hard voice. Her expression didn’t change, and her eyes didn’t waver.

Liar.

“Your turn, Harvey,” said Rat, who was sitting to his left, and motioned to Harvey with his eyes. If he was trying to hide that stifled laugh, he wasn’t doing a very good job. Harvey shot him a sidelong glare and then looked down at his cards. He flipped through them lightly with his left hand to check their contents, picked one out of the five, and slid it to the center of the table. When the dealer slid another card back toward him, he stopped it with his fingertips, glanced at it, and drew it into his hand.

Harvey knew full well that it was a clumsy way to play cards, and he had to wonder if watching him was making the others impatient. But Kieli didn’t seem disposed to help him out today. She wasn’t even playing this game, but she’d made a point of inserting herself in a chair directly across from him. Her chin was propped on one hand so that she almost seemed to be leaning on the radio she’d set on the table, and she was watching him with unblinking eyes.

What the hell is up here?

Dinner was over, everybody’d wrapped up their little planning sessions or mini-rehearsals, but it was still a bit too early to go to bed. This was the brief time of day when the performers enjoyed the most freedom (or so Harvey’d been told; he wasn’t really wired for that kind of thing, so it pretty much went over his head). For some reason whenever he was in the camp at this time of night, he got roped into a card game. Five or six of them would drag an oil stove out to the clearing for warmth and sit around a table under one of the lights together.

Bearfoot and Rat were usually joined at the hip, but Bearfoot wasn’t playing today. Apparently he’d gotten royally chewed out by Shiman. He’d trudged right past them back to his trailer earlier, looking a little despondent.

Harvey’d gotten a rundown of the robbery last night. They’d lost some of their supplies, somewhat more money than they’d have liked, and a car radio; but it sounded as if everybody was just happy that Kieli and Nana weren’t hurt. It’d be tough to steal their things back from the downtown punks, anyway. There was no way the Church Soldiers would put any serious effort into investigating some downtown crime, and even if they did, most of the stuff would’ve been pawned or fenced by now.

He’d give Bearfoot a good kick later, but mostly he was preoccupied with pointless regret, wondering if he should’ve gone with her. Shiman had told him to be her escort himself if he didn’t have anything better to do, but he’d flatly turned the man down—not because he thought shopping was a pain in the ass (though there was that), but because, although Shiman seemed to have forgotten it, Harvey was…well…

I’m not any good at the damn things, I told you that.

Mysteriously, Harvey just didn’t seem to have any driving skills. Not with motorbikes, trucks, or anything else.

“Everybody’s made his bet? Okay, show your hands!”

The players all started spreading their cards on the table, following the dealer’s instructions. Harvey jerked his attention back to the game and fumbled his own cards over. There were the five blue picture cards from the liberation army suit: judge, sword, revolution, bishop’s staff, and shepherd.

“Wait, wait, hold everything!” shouted Rat next to him, shooting suddenly up from his deck chair, which toppled over and hit the dirt with a modest but still annoying crash.

“What’s your problem?”

“How many times is that? How many times?! Nobody gets that many flushes! It’s not possible!”

“What are you trying to say?” Harvey asked, narrowing his left eye. Not to be outdone, Rat glared right back and went on in a low voice, “You’re cheating, aren’t you?”

“What’s your proof?”

“. . .”

All the other performers gulped nervously at the hostility between the two of them, and the bustle of conversation around the table went quiet all at once. Amidst this tense silence Harvey and Rat held each other’s stares for several seconds…and then they both sighed tiredly and looked away. “Well, whatever.” Harvey couldn’t concentrate on the game anyway. Not while she was looking at him with that gaze so sharp it was almost as if she was using it to physically get between him and the other man. Nobody else seemed to know what to do with this girl who’d broken into their all-male party with no fear whatsoever only to wordlessly stare at one fixed point. That one point, of course, being his face.

Harvey hung his head and groaned, running a hand through his hair. “Come on, what? Just say it.”

“…Liar.”

For a moment he missed that short, snarled answer, and pure habit made him respond with a “Huh?” even as he looked up at her face.

His whole body jolted with surprise.

Kieli’d kept her face a perfect mask up to this moment, but now there were tears in her eyes. She pressed her lips together, trying to hold them back, and looked down. But then before he even had time to think, she spat the word at him again, a little stronger this time: “Liar!” She kicked her chair over, standing up from it so quickly. The radio spewed static, trying to stop her, but she abandoned it and bolted out of their ring of light into the shadows behind the trailers.

“Wha…?” Harvey’s hand still rested, forgotten, on the back of his head. Astonishment froze him in place.

Until the other card players all started giving him looks anyway, clearly blaming him for something. Rat looked half-exasperated, half-triumphant. “What’d you do to her, man?”

“Hell if I know,” Harvey retorted, giving him a sideways glare. He felt sheepish somehow, though, so he averted his eye before long.

Did I do something wrong today…? He sifted through his memories, but nothing sprang to mind. Well, sure, he’d done plenty of things wrong, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t done any of them today.

Soon enough the group’s mood recovered, and they started up another round of cards. Harvey’s mind was only half on the game, though, so he lost big.

Just outside the trailer, Kieli bumped into one of the dancing women. “Oh, Kieli, are you turning in for the night?” She was holding a towel and a change of clothes. Kieli guessed she must be heading for the shower. “They say we’ll have hot water tonight! Thank God, after the water heater was on the fritz yesterday. Wanna come?”

It was a nice invitation, but Kieli just shook her head and slipped past, climbing into the trailer and burrowing under her bedcovers without even bothering to change into her pajamas first. Her bunk was just to the right of the back door. The other women had tried to get her to take a warmer place near the middle of the room, since she was a “guest.” Kieli, however, thought of herself as just an ordinary freeloader, so she’d convinced them to let her take the empty space near the door. And after all, this way, when she saw Harvey sneaking out at night, she could slip out and follow him without having to step on anybody.

Liar, repeated her heart on an endless loop. She pulled the blanket up over her head.

He’d told her about the research facility in the capital, but now she knew he hadn’t told her anything about what was most immediate and important of all to her: himself. He hadn’t said anything about meeting Joachim in the capital. And what had Joachim meant about Harvey’s core not working right…?

In hindsight, there’d been clues everywhere. She didn’t think his minor injuries were healing as fast as they used to, and it was weird that the right arm he’d lost two years ago hardly seemed to be growing back at all, and now that she really thought about it, it was only recently that the Corporal had started going overboard with his lectures about every tiny scrape and bruise. The Corporal must have found out about this not too long ago.

Ephraim’s going to die one of these days, you know.

Going to die one of these days…going to die one of these days…

A voice was echoing round and round in Kieli’s head. At first it was Joachim’s unremarkable voice, but the tones were steadily overwritten in her memory until it started to sound like Harvey himself speaking the words.

Harvey, die before Kieli? The possibility had never even occurred to her. Not even as a one-in-a-million chance. She had known all along that they couldn’t be together forever, she thought she knew that now—but she’d had a vague certainty that their parting would come when he finally kicked her out of his life, or when she was really old, or when she died. Even that time when she’d heard that he might’ve died in the capital, she’d been able to tell herself that he wasn’t like normal people, and so he couldn’t have died—but if he was like normal people after all, he really could have died like anyone else.

“No…,” she murmured underneath the covers. Even to her own ears it sounded muffled and weak. It sounded as if she were about to cry like some spoiled kid. She couldn’t imagine a world without Harvey. She didn’t want to imagine one. Because Harvey was her world.

…No, I can’t cry…

She focused her energy behind her eyes, willing the tears back down. The reason he’d been able to tell the Corporal but not her must be that he hadn’t wanted to see her cry. She told herself that she had to get it together, and it just made her painfully aware of her own powerlessness. It was because she didn’t have it together that she couldn’t get him to talk to her about anything…

Still cocooned in the blanket, Kieli shifted until she could curl up into a ball with her arms wrapped around her knees. It really was chilly next to the door. Once the bed had cooled off, her body heat wasn’t enough to warm it up very much.

“Kieli?” said an innocent voice overhead. Kieli tugged the blanket down just enough for one eye to peek out. Nana was crouched on all fours next to her pillow, peering at her. When had Nana gotten here? “Does your tummy hurt?”

The little girl looked so serious that Kieli floundered a little. “Um…no.” Then she realized that Nana had brought her own pillow and her teddy bear along. She was clutching the pillow to her stomach so that as she crouched she was almost lying on top of it. Now she shyly dragged it up and asked, “Is it okay if I sleep here? Mama says she has to clean up more stuff.”

Instead of answering, Kieli scooted toward the wall and lifted the blanket up. Nana burrowed in underneath it with teddy and pillow. Now they were crammed in tight, since the bunk was a little narrow even for one person, but when the two of them (plus bear) snuggled together with the blanket pulled up over them, it was warmer than before.

It was a touch too early for the adults to go to sleep. They could hear distant noise and talking somewhere far off beyond the walls, but inside the trailer it was just the two of them. Maybe I’m just like Nana, Kieli thought. She was a lot older than Nana, so she needed to be able to do so many more things, but just like Nana, she was always left back at the camp, always unconditionally protected…

“…Hey Nana, would you be okay without me here tomorrow?” she asked the top of Nana’s head, which was tucked under her chin. Without lifting her cheek from her pillow, Nana tilted her head to look up at Kieli with big eyes that somehow seemed expressive even without much open emotion in them, and just mumbled “Mm-hmm” before turning her eyes back down again. Kieli guessed it was the reaction she’d expected. (Lately she’d grown able to call Nana’s reactions. She could kind of see what Harvey’d meant, calling them “birds of a feather.”)

“There’s something I’ve got to do. I’m sorry…”

Tentatively stroking Nana’s hair as the younger girl nestled her face into the pillow, Kieli gazed at the blue-tinged gray darkness of the trailer wall.

I’ll go tomorrow.

In the morning, the slums were so dead of any activity that it was hard to believe all the nighttime uproar had really happened. The “tired” vibe hung sluggishly over the neighborhood now the way she would have expected it to at night. Maybe it was too early for the people who lived here to be out and about.

She stood in a slum in northeastern downtown. There was a reason she’d recognized the street name when he’d given her the address: the abandoned building in front of her was only a few blocks from Christoph and Toby’s apartment. In fact, it was the very same building where Harvey and Christoph had played tag on the fire escape.

Letting her eyes trace the cracked concrete walls up to the rooftop from her position on the street, she made it out to be seven stories. Most of the panes were gone from the windows, leaving nothing but rows of gaping dark caverns, but there were ones on the second and seventh floors that still had glass in them.

Kieli turned her back on the building for the moment and looked across the street. Between the crumbling rooftops of the slum, she could make out the park clock tower veiled in sandy gas.

You can see the clock tower from it. That’s what he’d said. The second floor was probably at borderline height, so the seventh floor was a better bet. The front entrance was locked; she circled around to the alley in the back and climbed up the fire escape. The dilapidated staircase creaked. It sounded strangely loud in the deserted alley.

When she peeked inside through the emergency door on the seventh floor, there was a long, narrow hallway stretching ahead of her into the building. It was blanketed with a snowfall of fine debris and shards of glass. The doors along one side were in the same state as the windows; that is, mostly missing. Light from outside filtered in through the empty frames to fall on the floors beyond. Kieli gave herself a chance to catch her breath, and then slid feetfirst into the hallway. A piece of glass crunched softly under her boot.

She could hear running water somewhere nearby. Apparently the pipes were still working. Yeah, if you were going to squat somewhere, the one thing you’d want to make sure it had would be water.

The fourth room from where she stood still had a door, which was ajar. It seemed as if the sounds of the water were coming from inside. Kieli called up her mental picture of the building’s exterior and decided that the area that still had window glass was right around here, too. She surveyed the room from around the corner of the door, and when she didn’t see anyone there, she pushed it a little further open and slid inside, careful not to make a sound as her eyes swept her surroundings.

So there’s nobody here…After all that, it was sort of a letdown.

By the look of things, this place had been a cheap hotel, the kind with only tiny, simple rooms. A sofa with springs sticking out everywhere that was far past saving and a low, lopsided table took up half of this one. Along the far wall stood a bed covered in dusty blankets.

There was another half-open door in one of the side walls. It must lead to the bathroom; from the other side of it came the same water sounds, more clearly than before. That way, maybe?

Kieli crept up close, keeping her footsteps and her breath both soft. Just as she drew her face up close to the door frame to peek inside, she abruptly realized something and stopped short. Wouldn’t peeking into a bathroom she knew someone might be using normally be pretty bad? Not that the business that brought her here today was exactly “normal.” It was so hard to make up her mind…

“Yo,” said a voice very suddenly from just behind her ear. She instinctively tried to jump aside, but an arm wrapped around her neck from behind and yanked her. Icy terror gripped her heart at how warm and waterlogged he felt clinging to her back. She shuddered.

“You need to be a little more careful. At least consider the possibility of an intruder-detecting device on the door.”

“Let me go!” Kieli struggled and kicked, trying to pry his arm away, but of course her strength was no match for his. So instead she curled her fingers into talons and clawed him as hard as she could with both hands. But something was wrong; his skin felt…mushy. Hmm? With her neck still locked in place, she had to look down by moving her eyes. She gulped. The skin of the lower arm protruding from his sleeve was pulpy, as though someone had stirred it with a poker.

“No! No…” Kieli bent her body backward and fought for all she was worth. This time she was released with no fuss. Nearly stumbling from the excess momentum, she immediately ran for the nearest wall and practically plastered her back to it as she turned around to face him again. The sight of his face gave her an even greater shock.

The left side of it was normal, but the skin of its whole right side from his temple all the way down his cheek was a greenish color and looked as though it had been boiled. Just like Christoph…

“Now that’s just not nice. You wound me,” Joachim complained. Halfway through the grumble he was seized by a coughing fit. Eventually he heaved a dark gob of something that could have been a piece of his own rotten internal organs onto the floor. Kieli tried to move backward without thinking and only succeeded in bashing the back of her head into the wall. She had to clap a hand over her mouth when she felt her own stomach lurch in sympathy. And that was the position she stiffened and froze in as she watched Joachim crumple to the floor cradling his stomach. She stared in astonishment.

After a while, she moved the hand that had been covering her mouth enough to timidly ask, “Why did this happen to you?” You looked just fine yesterday!

Joachim didn’t answer. Still doubled over, he wearily lifted the green-skinned arm and pointed further into the room. In the direction of his finger lay the bed. Kieli guessed he must be telling her to take him there.

“Why should I?” she protested. But it looked as though an unwillingness to answer wasn’t his problem; he couldn’t answer. After several seconds’ hesitation, she carefully stepped away from the wall. She didn’t see how she had a choice, really.

She approached him cautiously, one step at a time, ready to run the instant there was trouble. Even when she came close enough to touch, however, Joachim showed no signs of moving. So she crouched down and tugged experimentally at the sleeve of his shirt. Well, that definitely wasn’t going to get them anywhere. She grabbed his normal arm with both hands instead and dragged him across the floor to just beside the bed.

When Joachim set his own hand on the bed, Kieli jumped away in a flash and ran to her old position by the wall. She’d done her best to avoid touching him in any of the gross spots, but her coat was wet at the chest and sleeves.

Joachim, on the other hand, was wet as a drowned rat from head to toe. It looked as though she’d interrupted him throwing up in the bathroom with the shower running. His shirt was so soaked she could see through it; looking closely, she realized “thin” wasn’t the right word at all for him. He’d lost such an incredible amount of weight that he seemed literally skin and bones. Maybe there’s…not much left inside his body…? No normal person could still be alive like this, obviously.

In the end he crawled up onto the bed on his own and scooted right up next to the wall before turning around to sit with his back against it. Then he slumped, head drooping. “Sometimes—I can’t control my energy—and it just—goes haywire…I’m better off than that—failure, though.” His speech was broken, but the illness must have calmed down enough to let him talk, at least. His tone held the same old sarcasm as always.

Finally, an answer to her question. And it clicked. Oh, so that’s it. He got reanimated with a replica core, just like Christoph. So it makes sense that he’s alive again even though I was so sure he was dead. And what he said about seeing Harvey in the capital—if they met in the lab, then that all fits together, too. Did he run away just like Christoph, too, then, and that’s why he’s hiding here…?

Without moving away from the wall, she said in a hard voice, “I didn’t come here to play nurse. I came to ask you about the capital, and about Harvey. You said you’d tell me.”

Joachim didn’t lift his head, but he twisted the corner of his mouth up in what would have been a wry smile on someone more human. “So mean. You—really don’t like me, do you?”

“I hate you!” Of course she did. He was the guy who’d killed Harvey once two years ago.

As if reading her mind, he grumbled, “Sheesh. He killed me, too, so we’re even, aren’t we?” He coughed again, more lightly this time, and spat a bloody hunk of something onto the bedclothes. The black, coal-tar-like blood wriggled there like a living thing for a few seconds, but it quickly stopped moving.

Dong…Ding-dong…

In the distance, a bell sounded. When she shifted her gaze from the bed to the window, she could see a little of the clock tower over the roof of the building across the street. It was the toll she could hear faintly even from the camp, the one that heralded noon. She’d stopped by the park before coming here to drop Nana off with Bearfoot, so she didn’t have to get home before evening.

“Well, have a seat.” Joachim motioned with his jaw toward the sofa with the escaped springs and peeling upholstery. Kieli highly doubted it would be comfortable to sit on. “No tea for you, though. Oh, come to think of it —” He grinned for a moment, as if he’d thought of a good prank to pull. Then he switched to the same gentle, sincere voice and expression that he’d used two years ago as a priest (though half his face was ruined now). “You like hot chocolate, if I remember right. Sorry, I’ll treat you next time.”

Kieli’s spine itched. She rubbed it against the wall and answered him with no humor on her face. “I don’t want anything. And I’ll stay standing.”

“What an unkind girl. You were so much more honest and stupid and cute back then,” he informed her with casual rudeness. Then he sighed tiredly and dropped his gaze to somewhere between his splayed legs. After a pause for breath, he gave another malicious smile. “So, where should I start? Oh, and just to warn you, I do lie sometimes. Think for yourself about which things are lies and where the truth starts. I’m not giving you any hints.”

And with this preface, he began offhandedly telling the story of the capital.

When he asked if everything was all right, the boy thought for a minute, and then said, “Yeah, I think so…Brother is doing well. Mom’s happy, too—she even made meatloaf for him last night. That’s his favorite. It might be the first time I’ve had any since the day before he left.” He looked so happy as he reported this that Harvey couldn’t bring himself to grill the kid about it. He hadn’t come here to hear about meatloaf, though. “Come in and stay for a while.”

“Nah. Thanks, kid. You go on back.”

He parted with the boy after just a brief check-in and watched him run back to the apartment building. As he leaned against the wall of the alleyway and gazed at the window of the corner room on the first floor from this distance, the radio said smugly from beneath his chin, “You say it’s none of your business, but here you are worrying. Coming all the way out here to check on them, too!”

“I’m not worried about him,” Harvey answered sulkily. He wished he hadn’t brought the stupid thing along. Thanks to Kieli’s incomprehensible behavior during the card game last night he’d had to go back to his trailer alone, and he’d wound up with the radio in his possession as a side effect. He hadn’t seen her once this morning, either. The others all said she’d left early with Nana to visit the park. It seemed to him that she’d completely broken her promise to do whatever he said, but the whole search for the “moving corpse” had been settled, and his conscience was far from clear where she was concerned, so he was reluctant to make an issue of it.

The Corporal had hounded him with questions last night, mostly variations on “What the hell did you do this time, you bastard?!” (And what did he mean by “this time”?) However, Harvey was just as stumped about this last argument as the radio was. He honestly didn’t have a clue. At this point, he pretty much just wanted to say Whatever; please just don’t give me anything else to worry about.

Speaking of the park, there was still that weird magnetic field he’d been ignoring. Dammit, the moment he settled one thing, some other problem always cropped up…

Now his temples were throbbing. Harvey winced. Habit made him reach for the cigarettes and lighter in his pocket. He lit up, took a drag, and felt the smoke make its way to his brain, easing his headache somewhat…It had certainly occurred to him that he had a full-blown dependency on the stuff at this point, in several senses.

Given the others he’d seen at the lab, he didn’t see any reason to assume that Christoph would be able to maintain his human mind or sanity forever. And when he thought about that he couldn’t get it out of his mind, until finally he’d ended up coming out here to look in on him (did that count as “worrying”? Not that he wanted to admit to that, of course).

And there was one more thing he couldn’t get out of his mind. A personal thing.

“I was just wondering why he came back.”

“Excuse me? Do people need a reason to go home?”

“That’s not what I mean.” Harvey guessed he hadn’t been clear enough. He tried again. “I meant, I was wondering how he remembered where his home was.”

The radio answered with the sort of silence that meant it didn’t even know what question to ask next. That was when he first realized they were having a more fundamental problem than how “clear” he was being: he was saying things that just plain didn’t make any sense to his companion. He looked down at the radio around his neck and blinked his left eye. “Wait…didn’t I ever tell you that I don’t remember anything from before I died?”

There was a few seconds’ pause.

“No, you didn’t,” replied the radio in a strangely flat tone.

After a moment it seemed to get its usual nagging groove back. From below his chin, Harvey was blasted with a burst of disgusted words and static. “You bastard, it is way past too late for that little bombshell! You should’ve told me that years ago!”

“Well, I kind of thought I’d already said something…” He turned his head slightly to avoid taking the shout full-on and searched his memory. Huh, so I hadn’t told him? It wasn’t the type of thing he’d go out of his way to bring up, and it had always seemed so natural to him that maybe it’d never occurred to him to explain it to anyone else. “I mean, I was brain-dead for a while, you know?” he said matter-of-factly, as if it had nothing to do with him. Then he thought that maybe he’d been too matter-of-fact.

Just as the term “moving corpse” implied, Undyings were created through the reuse of corpses. During that first death the brain also died, naturally, so it had to be rare for someone to come out of the process with his memories intact, as Christoph had. Supposedly human brains were very delicate things, and just a few minutes without oxygen caused fatal damage.

“Now I finally see why you didn’t know that song.”

“What song was that?”

“Why, you…”

“Oh.” He only remembered it after he’d already asked. They must be talking about that old song the ghost in the park had sung.

“You don’t actually have a memory problem, do you? You just have this stupid habit of asking what something is before you even think about it.”

…Okay, thought Harvey; I guess I can’t deny that one.

He did have a few fragments of memories, but as far as the life before his reanimation was concerned, he didn’t even remember where his own family had been from. Or how he’d died, or how he’d been born and raised, either, or anything about his parents or siblings—he didn’t have any feelings about siblings as such, so he rather imagined he’d never had any, but that was as sure as he could be. His parents were even more of a mystery. Somehow he had the feeling that not remembering them meant there hadn’t ever been any particularly good memories of them to begin with.

“That would explain why all the Undyings are so bankrupt personality-wise,” said the radio, sounding as if he’d reached some profound understanding.

Harvey narrowed his eye. “Lay off.” Then he let his gaze roam around the area, mumbling half to himself, “Anyway, isn’t that why we were so useful as instruments of war?” Someone with a decent personality, someone who had memories of being born to human parents, living his childhood, and growing up, would probably have a hard time becoming the kind of stone-cold killing machine people feared enough to call a “Demon of War”—though it was a little strange for him to be saying that. Those guys in the lab and in the waterways underneath Gate Town hardly had intelligence anymore, let alone personality; they were just monsters who instinctively destroyed things. And in truth, maybe it was only a thin, fine line that separated them from Harvey and the other Undyings.

There was a groaning noise.

Not this again…Harvey put a hand to his left ear and shook his head lightly.

Every so often he started to hear their voices moaning somewhere in the back of his mind like a sort of low tinnitus. He couldn’t do anything about it but wait until it naturally faded. It had been better for a while, but it was getting worse again since he’d met Christoph.

“…’m going home and not coming back.” He turned his back on the apartment building, tossing his spent cigarette to the ground and grinding it out as he did so.

“‘Not coming back’? Wait, are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Yeah. And when the Colonization Days holidays are over we’re leaving Westerbury. We need to start looking for Bea again, so we’ll head back to the border for a bit to —” He was going to the trouble of actually declaring his plans, which he never did, partly to remind himself of them. He wasn’t about to get mixed up in Christoph’s problems, or in theirs, any more than he already had.

He told himself it was none of his business, but he was pressing his hand to his ear again. That low ringing was still sounding deep in his ears—those groans that seemed to be cursing anyone and everyone who could hear, yet at the same time calling for help. He’d feel a lot better just being cursed.

It’s none of my business, it’s none of my business, Harvey repeated to himself stubbornly, although it wasn’t much more than a token protest by now. Each time he thought the words, it only brought back the memories.

A dark cave, groans filling the air, and the indistinct sounds of gunfire…

It happened while he was lying exhausted on the scaffolding that ran along the ceiling, forcing himself not to vomit at the awful stench filling the air. That was when he heard the roar.

A carbonization gun.

Reflex sent him springing to his feet at the sound of gunfire directly below him, and he came dangerously close to whacking his skull on the ceiling before his metal right hand cupped the back of his head and held him clear. He offered a silent thanks to the prosthetic and risked a look down, holding his breath in the shadows of the scaffolding’s chain-link sides.

There were muffled voices muttering below him, and he could see two men walk up from the direction of the wall, which he couldn’t see from this position, carrying something large between them. What’s that?

Harvey pressed his face to the metal and squinted. His nausea immediately got worse.

Their cargo could only be called a decomposed body. Skin had rotted off, and the bones were starting to show through. In the vicinity of its heart was a smoldering black hole. The two men dragged the limp corpse along, each supporting one side.

Soon a heavy thud sounded somewhere beyond the darkness, and the workers returned unburdened, talking softly. They must have tossed it down a hole or something. Maybe they didn’t even have any comments on this task of body disposal anymore; they chatted about utterly everyday things like whether the cafeteria’s mincemeat-and-tendon soup tasted too strong or too weak. For all that the conversation was out of place, it was also strangely vivid, and Harvey clapped a hand over his mouth again to keep the rising acid down.

Gulping, he took a deep breath and pulled himself together. He’d never cared about meat one way or the other, since it wasn’t as if he needed to eat, but he had the feeling he would always hate it now.

After he confirmed that there was no human presence left in the area, he hung his upper body off the edge of the scaffolding, surveying the space below him from upside-down. The only illumination came from pale, scattered emergency lights, so he didn’t have a good view, but it seemed long and narrow, like a corridor. Small barred-off rooms like jail cells lined one side.

“Whoops…” While he’d hung there looking around, he’d almost slipped headfirst right off the platform. So he did a half-rotation about the length of a somersault and hung suspended for an instant by just his right arm before dropping to the floor. His feet didn’t make a sound when he landed, since he’d deadened most of the impact, but as his right hand let go it rattled the metal grating above his head and sent a surprisingly loud crash echoing up and down the hallway. “Gah, you idiot!” he spat at his partner in a whisper. He froze in a crouched position, alert to any movement nearby.

Luckily, the two body-carriers from before didn’t come back. Harvey scanned the walls and ceiling for security cameras just to be on the safe side, but he didn’t see any of those either. He breathed a sigh of temporary relief.

The floor beneath his feet was made of something like linoleum, but the walls and ceiling were bare rock. Right beneath the dim ceiling was a rusting walkway just wide enough to admit an assortment of pipes, large and small, plus one person.

These were the remains of a power plant cut into the rock walls of the capital’s mountains. Before the War, this layer of the northern mountain range had supposedly been a treasure trove of high-purity fossil fuels. And now it was used as a facility for researching those lost fuels—or at least, that was the official story: just an ordinary research lab studying the use of natural resources.

There seemed to be relatively few workers for a facility of this size, so thus far he hadn’t had the misfortune of bumping into any humans. It’d been drastically harder to move freely after entering the capital (though he knew that was only to be expected), and having to pull off the tricky task of infiltrating a top-secret facility had driven him to his wits’ end, but now that he was actually inside the place, it was comparatively easy to get around.

A groan.

At first, Harvey wondered what kind of animal was making that noise. It was a long, low sound that seemed to crawl up to him, making the stagnant air just above the floor vibrate. A short time after it first reached his eardrums, he realized that the groan was coming from a human throat.

…They’re alive…

He saw the shadows of living creatures squirming behind the iron bars that lined the wall. It seemed as if countless forms were packed into the narrow spaces, piled on top of one another, but from this distance he couldn’t really see enough to tell for sure. He crawled on hands and knees a little closer and peered into one of the tiny cells—and then he gasped and somehow forgot to breathe.

The thing closest to him lay on its back, a fist-sized black stone buried in its gaping chest cavity. Inside the stone, a dull amber light flickered like a heartbeat. The figure twitched jerkily in time with it, and with each convulsion skin cells seemed to bubble up from the inside only to quickly rot off.

A choking sound escaped Harvey’s mouth when he finally drew breath again, and in that moment it turned glaring eyes on him. Harvey let out a bleat of surprise at the hand that suddenly shot through the bars to grab at his shirt, but just in the nick of time his false right arm gleamed, slapping it away.

Clang!

The instant its hand bounced off the iron bar, there was a low buzz on top of the noise the impact made. The hand was snatched back as if repelled, and then it stopped moving for good—now it only stared pleadingly at Harvey, pupils dilated.

“Th-Thanks…” Harvey tore his gaze from its eyes and wiped the sweat off his forehead with his shirtsleeve. The motor in his prosthetic’s elbow gave a quiet, sort of proud-sounding purr, as if it had cleared its name after that little blunder earlier. “Nah, that doesn’t even count as a blunder. Idiot.” If they were going to define this in terms of who owed whom, Harvey was already up to his eyeballs in debt. Relieved somewhat by the presence of his partner, he shook off the horror and looked up at the iron bars in his way.

Are they booby-trapped somehow…? Sitting on his knees, he reached with his left hand for the crossbar holding the door closed. As soon as his fingertips brushed it he felt a chill run through him, and he rapidly yanked them back.

It felt the same as that weird gun the crazy scientist in South-hairo had had. On the face of it these seemed like ordinary iron bars, not even particularly strong, but if they were all charged with this, those creatures wouldn’t be able to touch them. That scientist—“Daniil,” wasn’t that his name?—had said he’d been here eight years ago. Apparently their technology’s development had taken a slightly different turn since then…He caught himself feeling almost impressed and cursed softly. Everybody and his brother just had to come up with some new idea to make trouble for him.

He glanced down one more time (without making eye contact) at the glaring thing lying on the floor in front of his knees. He started to wonder whether, if Daniil’s little sister’s “replica” had been functioning, she would have turned into this, too…and then he quickly banished the idea from his imagination. Fortunately—if he could call anything about the situation “fortunate”—that would never happen.

Time to get a move on. Harvey wanted to get this over with as soon as possible and get the hell out of here. But even assuming Jude was somewhere in this facility, if creatures like this were wandering around everywhere, Harvey had to admit it was doubtful he could stay sane long enough to find him.

He stood up, forcing himself to scrape up some fighting spirit, and turned his head from right to left as he thought about what to do next. That was when it happened.

“Yo. Nice thing you’ve got there,” echoed a voice off the rock wall. For a split-second Harvey froze stiff. Without moving a muscle, he rolled his eyes in the direction it had come from. There were no signs of life in the corridor. The long, narrow enclosed space stretched on straight ahead as far as the eye could see by the emergency lights.

“Sheesh. Over here,” it called again mockingly. In a cell just two doors up, a figure lay sprawled as close to the bars as it could get without coming into contact with them. Its limbs were splayed at unnatural angles. As Harvey watched, its face lifted a few centimeters off the ground and turned toward him. That face was sickeningly familiar, and yet so very unremarkable that at first he couldn’t remember who it was—not until the man tilted his head a little, and the murky glow of the emergency lights hit his bluish-gray eyes.

“What the —?!” Harvey fell back a step, horror-stricken. All thoughts of being quiet had flown right out of his head, so his shoes crunched against some of the dust layering the linoleum floor with a scraping sound.

“Come on, now, is that any way to react? Hiya, Ephraim, it’s me…”

Joachim stretched his right hand out toward him through the bars. The skin on the back of that hand looked like the skin on all the other things: it had putrefied and regenerated by turns so many times that excess cells welled up, fell off, and flip-flopped around on the floor like separate creatures.

“H-How did you…?”

“It’s not all that mysterious, is it? They collect corpses from all over the planet and use them as experimental subjects. And you did kill me.” Evidently satisfied with Harvey’s response, his sunken, unremarkable cheeks quirked in a twisted smile. “So, what’d you come looking for?…Oh, is that little girl’s corpse here, too?”

“You bastard!” Unthinkingly Harvey took a step toward him, hand forming a fist to punch that smile off his face, but he managed to stop himself before he went any further. Inside he was boiling with rage. He wrestled down the urge to beat the other man to death this instant, instead just spitting out, “She’s got nothing to do with this.” At that, Joachim gave a laugh that gurgled in his throat like it was getting caught on a froth of his own blood.

“Must be Jude then, eh?”

He was struck speechless.

“So I was right. Give me a prize.”

“. . .” Why did this man have to get on his nerves so much every single time he spoke?

“Why are you so fixated on a guy like that? Me, I hated him. Don’t you remember that time in Easterbury’s occupied zone when he ordered us not to sack the place? Talk about hypocritical. And when kids would come up to him he’d always give them gum or something, even though our supply lines were overextended, too, and everything was hard to come by! It seriously pissed me off—hey, wait. Wait!”

Harvey flatly ignored the sudden memory-lane routine (no way did he even want to hear this guy talk about the past) and started making a wide circle around Joachim’s cell so he could continue down the hallway, but the other man called him back again. He paused resignedly.

“Hey, help me out as long as you’re here. This place seriously stinks.” He pressed his face up close to the bars without quite actually touching them, and said, “We’re old friends, right?”

“Like hell we are!” Harvey sure as hell had never thought of them that way. He began walking again, not meeting Joachim’s eyes. “If I feel like it, I’ll come back to kill you later. Relax and look forward to it. I’ll release you from that pathetic body of yours for old times’ sake.”

“I said wait. I know where Jude is.”

He stopped again just past the cell and glanced toward its inhabitant without turning around. The other man abruptly wiped the smile off his face and looked serious, his dimly glowing slate-colored eyes boring into Harvey’s own through the bars.

“If it’s Jude you’re looking for, he’s here all right. I’ll tell you where, so lend me a hand already.”

“…And why exactly should I believe you?”

“You don’t have to believe me. But you came because you thought he was here, didn’t you?”

They fell silent for a while, glaring at each other. The moans coming from the other cells rang in Harvey’s ears. They sounded horribly amplified—keening groans rising and falling as if through a loudspeaker. He shook his head to dislodge the echoes from where they seemed stuck in his eardrums, and then let the motion carry him, spinning him about-face.

He made his way back to stand in front of Joachim’s cell. “Stand back,” he spat down at the prone man. “And don’t you dare touch me.” Joachim meekly obeyed, dragging himself laboriously backward. As Harvey drew up close to the bars, he saw the cell was a cesspit: the floor was buried in dried-out vomit and excrement, scraps of necrotized tissue, and other bits of refuse. He gulped down the bile rising in his throat again. Disgusting.

“Can you touch it?” he asked his right arm. It rose in answer and lightly brushed against the bars in front of him. When it confirmed that Harvey’s flesh body wasn’t affected, it took one of the bars in a firm grip.

The motor at his elbow gave a faint whine, and the iron bar slowly but steadily began to bend.

Harvey fumbled his lighter as he attempted to walk and smoke. “Crap…” He tried to catch it before it hit the ground, but his depth perception failed him, and his hand missed it by a hair. The corner of the cheap lighter made a cheap sound hitting the pavement.

When he crouched down to pick it up, the tip of someone else’s shoe hit it and sent it flying.

“. . .”

Harvey just watched it rattle noisily down the road, his arm hanging in the air half-outstretched. Then he lifted his face with the unlit cigarette still in his mouth. There were three or four young men standing above him. From the look of them, they had to be slum hoodlums. They were radiating haughty arrogance, though Harvey sure didn’t see anything for them to be proud of.

One of them, the one who had the middle of his face secured with tape and a giant square of gauze, looked down at him with obvious malice and growled, “I thought you looked like him, but I guess you’re not my guy.” He sounded mad about it. If someone’s going to get mad here, shouldn’t it be me? Harvey wondered, blinking his single eye. The boy caught the motion and stared openly at his face—at the gauze covering his right eye, and then down at the empty right sleeve tucked into his pocket—and muttered a curse too fast for Harvey to make out. He got the impression it was some kind of slur people used on the streets here.

“Dammit, the next time I see him, he’s a dead man.”

“That guy’s fucked in the head.”

And with that, the punks walked right past him, grumbling to each other. Harvey didn’t have any particular urge to start a fight himself, so he just spared them a glance over his shoulder before picking up the lighter and standing up.

“What was their problem? And they didn’t even apologize!” the radio hissed.

“Beats me,” Harvey answered indifferently, and finally lit his dangling cigarette. Maybe he should be getting angry, but he actually cared so little that, offhand, he couldn’t even think how to work up the anger. Now that he could use only his left hand, he was dropping things a lot more often. But then again, without really thinking about it he was also using that inconvenience as a means of self-reproach, so he kept letting it continue.

He looked down at his empty sleeve and made low sound of frustration.

It was his own fault he’d lost his partner. His own fault, for being naive enough to believe that jerk for even a moment.

“Hey, I like that arm you’ve got. Something’s possessing it, right? Give it to me.”

Harvey ignored the over-familiar voice trying to strike up a conversation with him and concentrated on the task of crawling forward using one arm and his knees. He just always wants whatever I have.

He was creeping along after Joachim through the cramped space between the walkway and the pipes running along the ceiling. Every so often he almost got kicked in the face by the sole of the shoe a few centimeters in front of him; each time he hit his head on the pipes trying to dodge. “Pick up the pace. I don’t want to stare at your ass a second longer than I have to,” he grumbled softly.

Joachim, who was slithering along on his belly, craned his neck around to glare. His mouth twisted in displeasure. “Shut up. I’m doing the best I —”

And then right in the middle of the sentence, the other man’s upper body suddenly plummeted downward out of sight. “Gah!” Harvey automatically threw himself forward and grabbed the back of Joachim’s shirt with his left hand. He was dragged along the floor, and for a moment it looked as though they’d fall together, but then his right hand grabbed the steel frame near his feet and supported both of their weights.

There was a great gap in the network of slats they’d been crawling on where the joints should have connected them more closely. They lay on top of each other with their upper bodies hanging suspended off the edge. Harvey started to heave a sigh of relief at being saved, but at the last moment he caught his breath back in and held it. Relief turned to alarm. He could hear footsteps coming down the hallway below them.

Two suits (two people in suits?) of plate armor that looked like security soldiers stepped out of the dimness while they stayed frozen in that awkward position. They weren’t equipped over the face, but their white plating was the same as what the Undying Hunters wore. Luckily, they didn’t seem to have noticed Harvey and Joachim. They walked right along, with no pause in their metallic footsteps.

No sooner had Harvey thought they’d made it through their pinch than the man he was gripping with his left hand suddenly writhed and clapped both hands over his mouth.

“Ugh, no! Don’t throw up now, dammit!” Harvey hissed. He was panicking a little, but he couldn’t very well move now and make noise. He waited almost prayerfully for the soldiers to leave. Soon enough, the footsteps disappeared down the other end of the hallway. The instant they were gone Joachim’s control seemed to snap, and the glob of internal organs he’d hacked up fell to the linoleum floor with a wet smack.

Harvey finally let out the breath he’d been holding in a thin stream and crawled back up onto the walkway, carelessly yanking Joachim up after him while he was at it. Joachim, weak-faced, collapsed into one more coughing fit before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Then that same mouth quirked up in a thin, revolting smile and he whispered, “Sorry, man. Thanks for the rescue.”

“I only did it because if you fell they’d have found me, too,” Harvey replied bitterly in the same low voice. Dammit! I rescued him by sheer reflex! He was starting to pretty seriously regret not just dropping him. “Whatever; just hurry up and show me where he is.”

“Yeah, yeah. Why are you so hung up on Jude, anyway? What’s he ever done for us?”

“I’m grateful to him, even if you’re not.”

“Interesting.”

“Shut up. I’ve got no interest in having this in common with you.”

Joachim gave a disappointed snort, and they both looked moodily away from each other, abandoning the conversation to concentrate on crawling again. Eventually they came out of the bare-rock passageway and into a place with a paved ceiling. They cut through a ventilation duct into the crawl space between the ceiling and the roof, where tangles of cables and thick pipes made their path even more horribly cramped. A low, annoying noise like a boiler running vibrated deep in Harvey’s gut.

That was around the point where Joachim stopped. He looked over his shoulder at Harvey and gestured in front of them with a jerk of his chin. There was a ventilation grate in the floor. Dull bluish light bled up from it.

“Open it.”

“…Who the hell do you think you are?” Irritated, Harvey shuffled up to the grate and sat next to Joachim, who had scooted over to make room for him. His right hand gripped it and pried it off with a soft whine of the elbow motor. It made a huge scraping noise, but fortunately the power-plant noises around them were even louder, so it didn’t seem to be a problem. His right arm put the grating down softly, trying to avoid making any more noise (for whatever that was worth now).

“Come on, give me that thing.”

“Give it a rest already.”

“God, what’s the big deal about an arm or two?” he complained with complete disregard for any inconvenience to Harvey as he poked his head through the opening and scanned the area below. He pulled back up right away and motioned with his eyes. “Check it out.” So Harvey stuck his head down through the space he’d vacated and peered down.

Screech!

A shrill ringing seemed to pierce straight through his eardrums and deep into his brain.

Screech! Screech! Screech!

Wincing at the intermittent ear-splitting sound, he squinted into the space below, which turned out to be a room indistinctly lit by emergency lights. He could feel the chill of the crawl space’s floorboards even through his clothes, yet that room was enveloped in such heat it was sweltering.

It was a cheerless room. Which only meant it was undecorated—it was by no means bare. Tightly packed pipes, cables, and the like covered walls and ceiling, encroaching even up into their crawl space on the other side. And every one of them fed into the gigantic piece of equipment taking up the far wall, like the roots of a great upside-down tree.

He compared it to the room he’d seen in Daniil’s little sister’s memory. There were some differences—years had passed, after all, and it had been pretty wrecked at the time—but this was definitely the same place. Back then, Jude had been in there amongst that equipment…

“No…,” he panted without thinking, hardly realizing he was speaking. “No…”

In the deepest recesses of the equipment all the piping fed into, there was definitely a human form, just as there had been then. If you could still call it human, that is.

All that was visible now were a few scraps of ruined tissue centered around the black stone at its heart, where all the bio-cables were connected. Its limbs and head were gone without a trace. Exposed bits of nervous system dangled like bundles of string from a spinal cord that surely no longer functioned.

Barely-there human remains.

“Well, I hate to break it to you, but that’s what’s become of Jude. He’s nothing but an energy source to power this place and the ‘replica core’ production equipment.”

Harvey heard Joachim’s voice coming from somewhere behind him. The worsening ringing in his ears interfered, though, and the words became mere sounds, passing in one ear and out the other without ever reaching his brain. The sounds of the lab’s power machinery should have been louder, but the ringing dominated his hearing.

Screech! Screech! Screech!

The source of the noise was its heartbeat. Throbbing pain pierced his temples in time with the blinking of the amber light inside the stone.

His left hand was frozen in place holding the rim of the ventilation shaft, and he couldn’t get it to move. In its place, his right hand hesitantly reached up and brushed one temple. “Oh…I’ll be okay.” He bit his lip and somehow managed to peel his eyes away from that to press his forehead into his partner’s palm.

“So, there you have it,” said a flippant voice behind him at the same time that he was abruptly kicked down through the shaft. His left hand automatically took his whole dangling weight to keep him from falling, but a boot immediately kicked at his fingertips.

Even as he hit the floor of the room below, his eyes bounced up to the ceiling to fix on Joachim. “You little bastard!” He was missing a few fingernails now, but he blocked out the pain before the signals could reach his brain. “You set me up!”

“You always were easy to dupe. You won’t live long that way, you know.” Joachim’s sneering face peeked down out of the ventilation duct, and he actually waved before pulling himself back up. “Bye!”

Just when Harvey thought he’d gone, he popped his head down one more time. “Oh, hey, I’ll let you have some more decoys to distract them, so get on out of here if your luck holds out that long.”

This time he left for real.

Harvey grunted in irritation, more at himself than anything else, and let his gaze drop from the ceiling to do a quick scan of the walls around him. No sooner had he found the emergency lights for two exits, one in front and one to his right, than all the lighting was snuffed out. A second later his whole field of vision was bathed in dark red. The warning color—he was certain that in the dead girl’s memory he’d seen several surveillance cameras in this room. By the time he remembered this, the alarm had already begun to shriek.

“Shit…” The tinnitus in his ears hadn’t stopped, and the alarm combined with it made his headache even worse. He covered his ears with his hands and staggered toward the front exit, but several people appeared under its lighted sign, accompanied by the sound of violent footfalls. A platoon of armed security soldiers…their weapons didn’t seem to be carbonization guns, not that this thought comforted him much.

“Don’t move!”

Yeah, right! Harvey didn’t get the feeling that surrendering quietly would turn out any better for him than resisting capture. He changed course for the right-hand door.

Screeeeech!

The ringing suddenly grew drastically louder. He cried out; his head hurt like it was about to split open, and the pain and dizziness made his knees crumple. They raked him with gunfire without wasting their breath on questions or warnings. The first time his body was slammed to the floor he sprang up, only to be slammed back down again.

How many hits did I take? he asked himself, assessing the situation. His head seemed more or less fine, but his vision had blacked out and it was taking its sweet time coming back. Something felt really wrong with his chest. Blood frothed up in his throat—maybe one of the bullets had hit a lung.

He’d just about decided he couldn’t move when out of nowhere the alarm sounding somewhere behind the ringing in his ears rose to an even more fevered pitch, and people started shouting from a totally different direction.

“Who the hell lifted the security lockdown on Section 6?!”

“Send us reinforcements!”

“They’ve all gotten away!”

Nervous yells flew back and forth through the air, and the soldiers’ activities grew frenzied.

Harvey didn’t really get what was going on, but thanks to whatever it was, he still had a chance to escape.

So can I move after all? He tested his limbs and found he was just barely able to make them operate. He poured all the mental strength he could into shutting out the pain and the tinnitus, and attempted to stand up. But when he tried to prop himself on his right arm, it wouldn’t respond. It just hung limply from his shoulder. Why isn’t it answering me?

He had a bad feeling about this. Looking back over what had happened, he realized that if his right arm hadn’t moved
lightning-fast to protect his head, his brains would be splattered across the floor right about now.

Harvey took quick stock out of the corner of his eye. The metal frame was smoldering. He put it out of his mind for the moment and geared himself up again, pushing himself into a sitting position with his left hand. Then he was up and running toward the open emergency exit, but before he made it there he found himself turning to take one last look at the far wall.

And in that unguarded moment, a bullet gouged a path across his cheek, the impact rattling his brain around in his skull, and suddenly the right half of his field of vision was gone.

Still, he turned to take one last look at the far wall—

In the corner of his remaining vision, which was rapidly being eaten away by a spreading red stain, he confirmed for himself one more time that all that remained there was a ruined corpse—just a chest cavity and a few scraps of nervous system—and the truth he hadn’t quite been able to believe before finally sank in with a heavy, final click.

Oh…

So Jude is dead.

He’d wandered back kind of aimlessly, since he was mulling something over, so the sun was already setting by the time he reached camp. The performers were coming home from their day at the park, too. He could tell that things were livening up in the clearing.

Someone must be making dinner, because the smell of sizzling meat was coming from somewhere nearby. He came to a stop just past the wall of blocks at the entrance. The smell brought back bad memories, and nausea washed over him. He hadn’t eaten so much as a scrap of jerky since that day. In fact, just about the only things he’d really swallowed were water, smoke, and booze. He honestly wasn’t sure why his stomach hadn’t degenerated.

As he stood there considering just wandering off somewhere again, something rolled up to his feet. A rubber ball, about the size of a soccer ball. It was one of the ones they juggled in their street performances. It stopped when it touched the tip of his shoe, and then two tiny hands, grubby with sand, picked it up. The little girl crouching there looked up at him and said, “Welcome home, Harry!”

“That’s Harvey,” he replied, though he’d pretty much given up by this point. This was the radio’s fault for teaching her weird pronunciations.

“Everybody’s busy now. Let’s play!”

“Not happening,” he said flatly, but he pulled the radio off and deposited it in her hands as a substitute.

“Corp’ral, let’s play!”

“Sure. What should we play?”

“Ball!”

Harvey was pretty sure you couldn’t play ball with a radio, but he kept his mouth shut and leaned lightly on the block wall behind him. Habit made him reach for the pack of cigarettes in his pocket, but he’d smoked so many trying to relieve his ringing ears that he was fresh out. I’ll go get some from Shiman later.

He left his hand in his pocket and gazed aimlessly up at the camp lights dotting the twilit sky, though he watched Nana out of the corner of his eye as she started chasing the ball around by herself. Inside, he was questioning: Jude…what should I do…?

He’d figured that somebody would eventually censure or destroy or otherwise deal with that lab and those failed experiments—that at any rate, it wasn’t his job. Or more like, he didn’t want to make it his job. He had his hands full just taking care of the people close to him—himself, Kieli, the radio, and maybe Beatrix if he really stretched it. And he’d never felt the least inclination to help people he didn’t even know, either.

Yet now, no matter how many times he tried to convince himself it had nothing to do with him, he just couldn’t get their groans out of his head. It was only getting worse since that thing with Christoph.

He didn’t want to admit it, but he’d realized after meeting Christoph that in the end, he probably couldn’t leave them be after all.

The capital. I have to go there one more—

He sighed, and muttered without really meaning to, “But I can’t do that, can I…”

Obviously he wouldn’t be able to take Kieli with him this time either. He could leave her here with Shiman, or he could ask that bartender on the parish border to take care of her—there were trustworthy people to turn to—but then he’d be up and leaving her when he’d just decided during their reunion in Gate Town to stay with her as much as he could.

What was more, the next time he went there, he’d be going with a firm goal in mind: to destroy. So probably—probably he’d go there with no intention of coming back.

Harvey leaned back on the blocks, looked up at the sky, and repeated his question to the man who’d been his old friend and superior officer, the man who couldn’t possibly answer him. Tell me, what do you want me to do…? He wanted someone else to clinch this for him. If you’ll just ask me to do it, I will. I’ll man up and go obliterate everything that’s left of you without a trace…

Something tapped against his shoe. Looking down, he saw it was the ball again. Nana ran up to him, the radio hanging around her neck. He dropped the whole troublesome line of thought for the moment and kicked the ball back to her. Then it struck him that something was off. “Where’s Kieli?”

The ball bounced off a dip in the ground and veered away from Nana instead of toward her. She was so caught up in chasing after it that her answer was distracted: “Kieli? Oh, she’s not back yet.”

Harvey furrowed his brow. “Wait, I thought you two were going to the park together today.”

Nana picked up the ball, holding it lovingly to her chest, and then finally turned around to face him properly. “Nope,” she said, puzzled. “She went somewhere this morning. I’ve been with the bear.”

Another troupe treated them to a whole skinned, dried guinea hen for dinner that night. Apparently they’d all had a grand old time cutting, trimming, and cooking it. Since Kieli hadn’t made it back in time for the meal, she at least took over the cleanup, setting off for the washing area with a giant pile of dishes.

Water pipes ran along the outside of the back wall of the trailer equipped with the tank. Eight faucets were lined up there. Kieli took the one on the end and started filling the dishpan with water. She was deep into battle with the mountain of plates when she sensed someone nearby.

When she lifted her head, there was a tall, thin young man standing propped against the corner of the wall.

Now that she thought about it, they hadn’t actually crossed paths since she’d run out in the middle of the card game last night. Relieved to see his face after a day apart and uncomfortable about what had happened the night before, Kieli ended up frozen with both hands plunged into the dishpan.

He just stood there silently for a while, too, staring off into space, so between the two of them there was an awkward lull.

“W-Welcome back,” she ventured in a stiff voice.

“How was the park?” he asked abruptly. His voice came out with its usual lack of emotion, the sound of it so apathetic that she questioned whether he was really interested in the answer. “I was thinking, here we came all the way to Westerbury, and I haven’t taken you there. See, I can’t go in. What’s it like inside?”

“Oh, um, it was really fun. Uh…”

He didn’t give her time to go on. “Why are you lying?”

Kieli gulped, her mouth snapping shut. Then, suddenly inspired, she drew her hands out of the water and said unconvincingly, “I forgot, I left more dirty dishes back there.” She tried to escape, but a hand pushed at her shoulder none too gently, knocking her back into the wall. The tall form closed in, looming over her, and an arm propped itself against the wall to trap her there. Right now Harvey’s left elbow brushing against her right ear didn’t feel anything but scary. She plastered her back against the wall and shrunk in on herself.

Seeing Kieli’s fearful reaction to him, Harvey seemed more lost than victorious. “…Look, I’m not angry, okay?” he said, his voice over her head softening a little. “I don’t mind if you lie to me, really. I lie too. But you’ve stuck your nose into dangerous business again, haven’t you?”

“No.”

“Then where were you today?”

Kieli bit her lip and didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she answered him in a murmur, without looking up: “Why should I have to tell you every time I go somewhere? You never tell me.”

As soon as the words came out of her mouth even she thought they were pigheaded and stupid, but really, on this issue it was Kieli who had a bone to pick with Harvey.

He’d never told her anything—not that he’d known all along Beatrix wasn’t in Westerbury, or that he’d really been searching for Christoph instead, or that he hadn’t brought Kieli along because he’d thought Christoph might be dangerous—not a single thing! He liked to call Kieli reckless and all that, but if you asked her, Harvey was the one who was always going off and getting into trouble on his own. He might worry about other people, but he was totally indifferent when it came to himself, and he had no idea how that made her feel. Yes, she knew now…Harvey probably thought she still didn’t know, but she did.

After that gibe, she clammed up, still looking down. A tired sigh ruffled her bangs. “You and I are different, you know that.”

“No, it’s the same thing,” she murmured, softly but with no hesitation. This time Harvey was the one with nothing to say.

Kieli looked up through her lashes at the coppery left eye in front of her, and then all at once she reached out and touched the patch covering the right eye. Harvey tried to dodge her, a bit startled, so she stared him into submission.

“Why isn’t it healed yet?”

“What do you mean, ‘why’?” Harvey hedged. In the end apparently no ready excuse came to mind, so he blinked theatrically and looked away. They were facing off at close distance, and yet they kept just missing making any eye contact. A stiff silence passed between them.

The air was almost frozen with tension when an incongruously carefree voice called, “Hey, Kieli, I’ll help you out there!” at the same time that what looked like a ghost made of plates loomed out of the darkness around the corner of the trailer.

Bearfoot’s face peered out from a gap in the precarious mountain of dishes he’d piled so high he seemed sure to lose control of them any moment. When he saw the way Harvey and Kieli were standing, his mouth fell open in a little “ah” of surprise. By then, Harvey had pushed himself up off the wall and turned to walk away. As he passed the gaping Bearfoot, he glanced back over his shoulder at her, paying no attention to the other man, and said, “You don’t have to say anything now, but tell me right away if something happens.” That was all. Then he disappeared around the corner Bearfoot had just come from.